Comics Anthropocenes: visualizing multiple space-times in Anglophone speculative comics

Abstract

Comics and graphic novels have not typically been foregrounded in accounts of Anthropocene fictions. This article argues that speculative comics are particularly suited to visualizing the Anthropocene through their verbal-visual strategies for representing multiple scales of space and time. Defined as the era in which human-driven processes have become detectable in the Earth’s geological record, the concept of the Anthropocene has also been challenged by postcolonial and Indigenous theorists for presuming an undifferentiated humanity responsible for ecological crises. Speculative comics offer strategies for representing multiple scales of space and time that call into question the ‘human’ as a geological force. While autobiographical and documentary comics represent the scale of individual human experience, speculative comics feature nonhuman spaces and times on multiple, asynchronous scales. This article first contextualizes the representation of space and time in speculative Anglophone comics from early superhero comics to the contemporary period, then focusing on three case studies drawn from contemporary Anglophone comics: Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s Nameless (Citation2015), Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees (2014–2016, 2020), and Ram V and Filipe Andrade’s The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (2021).